Gate 62 — Preponderance of the Small — Caution, patience, and detail create advantage out of limitation

Full breakdown

We're moving over to the logical side of the mind. Here a completely different process is at work. Earlier I told you that we're dealing with two metaphoric gates, both involved in the process of translating what we see in the mind into what we call human language. We noted that gate 56, the gate of Stimulation, tells the story of humanity, the story of the human path. The ideas, notions, or concepts of the abstract mind are the ability to see sequences of images in the mind that can be retold as a story, so that what comes out is something like a film you narrate as a tale. It's a movie-story about what our life actually is, and about what our nature is. The logical process of forming concepts and representations works differently. Logic concentrates on patterns, and can only work on the basis of them. Patterns can be tested. On the intellectual level we call patterns formulas, theories, or opinions. They can be put forward and then subjected to thorough analysis and testing. You can believe in an idea. A pattern can be tested. The whole process of the logical, intellectual mind consists of translating these inner patterns into human languages and trying to describe them with words.

That's why gate 62 carries a different metaphoric quality than gate 56. Gate 56 tells its stories in order to spread a message about the essence of being, but gate 62 has to give names to all things. It has to call everything by its name. This is the gate that gives things names and labels and describes them so you can understand what's being talked about. It's the voice of fact. And it will never say "I believe" or "I don't believe." This voice says "I think" or "I don't think." You won't hear hope or sorrow in this voice. But it can sound well-founded or unfounded — it's the voice of logic, rational or irrational. Gate 62 is the gate of Maya. It expresses the absolute within the mechanics of Maya. Maya is the illusory world we live in, where we have to measure everything. This is the gate of weights and measures, the gate of measurement, and it measures by giving names to things and phenomena.

When you're dealing with someone who has gate 62, they're trying to organize mental images and trying to make sure you understand them. A storyteller just wants you to find some meaning in their story, but a person of logic will hand you facts, try to convince you through logic, and organize things by way of facts. By the way, if someone brings good facts and lays them out clearly, that doesn't mean they're right. It just means they're capable of working with facts. We all know — statistics being a good example — how facts can lie and lead us around by the nose, how the most convincing theories can fall apart, how meaningless well-founded opinions can turn out to be. Let's not moralize about any of that. This is purely about mechanics. Anyone with gate 62 is trying to use facts to get you to understand.

Over the lines in the black book it says that caution, patience, and detail create advantage out of limitation. That's the essence of being organized. The thing is, no collective process can happen inside a single being — it has to be shared with other people. And there's a tendency to share a mental, collective process with others before the right moment arrives, before real clarity has appeared. Caution, patience, and detail create advantage out of limitation. The limitation is the pattern itself; another limitation is the ability to actually understand that pattern. Please understand why we need to understand patterns. If we're not able to understand a logical pattern, we can't look ahead — project — into the future with any pleasure or without harming ourselves. The abstract circuit looks into the past to tell us what human experience actually is, so that we can accumulate a wealth of information, gathering countless details about all our processes. The logical process lays the foundation, establishes the structure we can build our future on. Mostly we learn about this from our politicians. They tell us our future will be wonderful if we follow their pattern. It's the scientist who says: "I've found the formula. If we manage to get it to market, in the future we'll be able to heal all these people. I know that if I'm given the chance to discover this, and this, and this, then in the future I'll be able to do SOMETHING." There's always a projection into the future here, which is exactly why the process demands caution and patience in gathering genuine, truly valuable detail.